As Bill Jemas clears his desk and phones the outplacement agency, let's keep one thing in mind.

Take a moment to think back to Marvel Comics as it stood pre-Jemas. Reflect, if you will, on the bankruptcy. The debt. The power struggles. The godawful comics. The company is, by any rational standard, in a much, much better state now than it was before he came in. There is money in the bank. The company is reasonably stable. Its comics have, on the whole, got better, and would seem to be selling more.

Whatever the criticisms that can be levelled at Jemas, and god knows there are plenty of them, it's not a bad record. Of course, Jemas can't claim credit for all of this - the end of the bankruptcy feuding was always going to produce a healthier company, and the creative end of things is supposed to be more Joe Quesada's responsibility. But Jemas has clearly been a driving force at Marvel over the last few years, and must deserve at least some of the credit for the company's improved fortunes.

Now, that said, the last year has seen increasing criticism of Jemas from a variety of sources. Marvel's higher echelons presumably agreed with some of that criticism, if they felt the need to replace him altogether. The interesting question is quite what part of Jemas' policies they objected to. Presumably his removal is going to be followed by a policy lurch in which Marvel try to solve these problems. So the next few months are going to be an interesting time for industry watchers - when a company the size of Marvel changes direction, it makes waves for everyone else.

There have always been, broadly, two schools of thought on why Bill Jemas Is A Bad Thing.

'Whatever criticisms can be levelled at Jemas, it's not a bad record.' First, there's the traditionalists. These are the people who liked Marvel the way it was; the hardcore fans of heavily interlinked superhero comics. They felt, quite correctly, that Marvel had taken a decision to abandon them as an audience. The sheer obnoxiousness of Jemas' interviews on the subject tended to make him a focal point for their anger - which of course was the point, since nothing could improve Marvel's credibility more than annoying these people.

Hopefully traditionalism is not the mindset now finding favour at Marvel. It would seem unlikely, because the traditionalists would merrily wind back the clock and take Marvel back to the mid-nineties. Even the most clueless and lazy executive can see that the sort of comics with traditionalist appeal have in fact been among Marvel's lower seller titles for years, and that writers like Brian Bendis and Bruce Jones have seen their books gain sales. The market has moved on; a reset to the pre-Jemas era would be insanely stupid.

Then again, Marvel has shown a noticeable back-pedalling from Jemas' controversy-baiting tendencies. The ludicrous furore over the X-STATIX storyline "Di Another Day" (soon to see print as the redacted "Back From The Dead"), and the silencing of Jemas as a mouthpiece for the company, all suggest a newfound discomfort with Jemas' entire approach, despite the fact that it's something that should surely have been obvious to them all along. On the other hand, while Jemas' grandstanding made sense during his reconstruction of Marvel's public image, a case can be made that the time for that sort of thing had passed.

The new administration is presumably responsible for the reversal of Mark Waid's firing on FANTASTIC FOUR, not to mention the somewhat baffling decision to revive THUNDERBOLTS (which sold abysmally even before the inane attempt to reinvent it as a different comic altogether). These decisions may reflect a more traditionalist mindset. But then, Jemas seemed to be on the verge of wiping out comics aimed at the traditionalist readers altogether. There's certainly a place for catering to that audience as part of a more diverse line, and FANTASTIC FOUR is surely the book to do it. Then again, an ongoing THANOS series? Really? In 2003?

'The traditionalists would merrily take Marvel back to the mid-nineties.' There's going to be a backswing towards the traditionalists, and up to a point that's fair enough, because Marvel had deserted them. The question is how far it'll go. Hopefully they're going to be disappointed. And Joe Quesada is still around as editor-in-chief, which should keep things fairly balanced.

The other half of Jemas' critics aren't traditionalists. Rather, they're people who broadly agreed with the general direction adopted by him and Joe Quesada, but have increasingly suspected that somebody is losing the plot.

Marvel has made some rather odd decisions over the last couple of years. That's against the background of generally good comics, but nonetheless there have been strange choices. Plenty of rumours have been doing the rounds of Jemas playing a heavy-handed editorial role (which surely isn't even in his job description) and laying down some quite bizarre rules on content. It's one thing to discourage the use of flashbacks; plenty of people have argued that they're a device vastly overused by lazy writers. But to lay down a rule banning them absolutely is simply absurd. It suggests, frankly, that somebody read STORY by Robert McKee and failed to notice the bit about "principles, not rules".

A bizarre fetish for decompressed storytelling has been noticeable. There is nothing wrong with decompression if it's suitable to the story being told. But the point of decompression is to give the details space to breathe. Some stories don't want to be told that way. And as long as the stories are still being published in serial form, you need to give something to the serial audience.

Brian Bendis can do this - plenty happens in all his issues of DAREDEVIL, it just takes place at a fairly micro level. Daniel Way can't, and the result is an opening storyline in VENOM that spent five issues establishing that Venom is dangerous, and an alien is hunting it down. Five sodding issues. That's enough material for a first issue, not a first trade paperback. What were they thinking? After entering the charts in the top ten, the book had lost around half its readers by issue #4 - completely blowing the momentum that the title had at the outset.

Seriously, who really thinks there's a market for a decompressed VENOM comic?

'There are rumours of Jemas playing a heavy-handed editorial role.' Other problems: The initial success of Jemas and Quesada's overhaul came in part because it was well timed. Every month another book would get some major change, or a new major title would be launched - at any given time, there was something that was The Event. And Marvel proved very good at making a book into an event.

But in the last few months they've abandoned that. Tsunami hurled a bunch of barely promoted and almost totally unrelated books into the market, lashed together by a shared theme nobody seems able to understand or describe, and saw them crash down the charts at high speed. The line means nothing to anyone and has merely prevented any of the individual books capturing public attention. Since Marvel chose to commemorate the seventh issues of the Tsunami books (seventh?!) by giving them all metallic ink covers, presumably the lesson hasn't sunk in. There is no point in an imprint that means nothing - and deluging the market is the precise opposite of what worked for Marvel in the recent past.

Then there's Jemas' own comics. MARVILLE was universally panned and sold diabolically. It's hard to imagine the book being published if anyone else had written it. NAMOR wasn't a great book either, and after the reaction to MARVILLE it was hardly surprising that it met such an unenthusiastic reception. In fairness, the underlying concept of NAMOR was a passable idea, but not with Jemas' name attached. It still got a 25c issue, which must have cost a bit of money. The shareholders might well ask why Marvel's executives were treating the company as a vanity press.

If these are the concerns, then that's fair enough. Of course, these don't go to the root of what Jemas and Quesada have done with Marvel over the last few years, merely the stranger quirks of the last few years. Marvel may well have reached the same conclusion as many other observers - Jemas did a great job overhauling Marvel, but it's now time for a different style of management to build on what's been done.

Over the next few months, we'll be looking out for signs of which way Marvel is going. Work seems to have begun on dismantling some of Jemas' recent decisions - he was barely out the door when, quite coincidentally, Marvel decided that it had enough Epic submissions, thanks. As a pet project of the outgoing manager, Epic is very vulnerable indeed, not least because the economic argument for it was never that compelling. I'm a cynic about these things, and I'll be honest - I don't think Marvel will ever re-open Epic submissions. The line will quietly be allowed to die, and the two relaunched UNLIMITED titles will take over the "new creators" remit. If Epic does continue in anything like the announced form, then that will be a very interesting signal indeed.

By the way, I assume the race is now on for the first website to secure an interview with Jemas. It would be interesting, if nothing else.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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